Ending the energy rip-off means breaking the big six deadlock

There are few more demoralising sensations in life than the feeling of being ripped off. And when the product or service is something that you simply cannot live without, the sense of futility and frustration is all the more acute.

Public anger over skyrocketing consumer bills running parallel with the huge profits and executive bonuses of the Big Six energy companies – EDF, E.ON, British Gas, Southern, Scottish Power and npower – is growing.

The amount we pay for our power seems set on a never ending trajectory upwards. Average annual household bills for gas and electricity rose from £600 in 2004 to around £1,200 in 2011. USwitch has predicted that by 2020, this could rise to a massive £3,202.

For many people hit by the perfect storm of job losses, frozen wages and rising living costs, the situation is becoming desperate. As many as 6 million British households are now thought to be living in fuel poverty, with around 3,000 premature winter deaths attributed to the impact of living in damp, cold and leaky homes.

OFGEM and DECC figures show that the driving factor behind the price hikes has been the rising wholesale cost of gas and the fluctuating costs of other fossil fuels, underscoring the urgent need for a move towards renewable energy and ambitious energy efficiency.

But to add insult to injury, the Big Six actually appear to be increasing their profit margins on each bill. Last October, OFGEM warned that profits on dual fuel deals had increased by 733%, from £15 per household to £125.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Public Policy Research has found as many as 5.6 million people may be being overcharged as a result of Big Six pricing policies which also, it believes, prevent new companies from gaining a foothold in the market.

Indeed, despite OFGEM’s mandate to create a truly competitive energy market, nearly two decades after privatisation, the profiteering Big Six still control more than 99% of the retail market.

To my mind, this is now about completely changing the behaviour of those operators and making it easier for new actors to enter the market. It is also about rethinking the way we produce energy in order to secure a more affordable and sustainable power supply.

So when the Deputy Prime Minister announced this week that he had struck a deal with the energy companies requiring them to send a once yearly letter to consumers with information about the cheapest tariffs, it felt like a monumental anti climax.

That’s not to say it isn’t a welcome development. Government proposals to simplify the confusing and complex range of tariffs which have often resulted in customers switching to a worse deal – and for customers to be offered the best tariff if their contract comes to an end – are well overdue, as are plans to give OFGEM powers to direct the energy companies to compensate overcharged consumers.

But reading this, I was struck by the fact that energy companies were not already obliged to do those things. With an estimated seven out of 10 people still not on the best available tariff, it seems the Big Six have been ripping customers off for far too long.

In February, I joined with Compass to help launch a campaign to End the Big Six Energy Fix – nearly 9,000 people have since signed the online petition calling for change.

We are appealing for an independent public inquiry into the energy industry, in the same way that that we had an Independent Commission on Banking led by Sir John Vickers and an investigation into the media by Lord Leveson, to get to the root causes of the problem.

In order to address the market failure and ensure that the energy companies pay a premium for their privileged market position, the campaign is also calling for a windfall levy on profits – with the money raised, together with revenues from environmental taxes, being channelled into energy efficiency programmes and demand reduction initiatives.

Because although the Government seems finally to be waking up to the potential of measures such as cavity wall insulation, loft lagging and condensing boilers, the Green Deal policies that are supposed to make these happen are weak and underfunded. Serious initiatives to reduce overall energy demand are still worryingly thin on the ground.

Furthermore, rather than tinkering around the edges with mail outs and barcodes on bills, we should be making it easy for communities and councils up and down the UK to generate their own energy – reducing consumer dependence on the Big Six.

The forthcoming Electricity Market Reform, albeit deeply flawed and overly complex, should in theory make it easier for smaller operators to enter the energy market. But this is far from certain, and the current proposals largely ignore the vast potential of community energy.

The Government should be doing far more to localise and decentralise the sector, drawing from best practice in countries like Germany where community ownership of the grid has played a pivotal role in allowing renewables and energy efficiency to flourish.

Here in Britain, where the grid is privately owned and controlled, people are far removed from energy generation and have little knowledge of where our energy comes from. Yet in Germany, citizens see themselves more as owners and generators of their energy, not just consumers.

With the right political will and ambition, we can create an energy sector which genuinely serves the interests of the people and protects the planet. But only by curbing the power of the Big Six, increasing transparency around bills, and investing in renewables, efficiency measures and demand management that will ultimately help wean us off fossil fuel addiction, can this become a reality.

Caroline Lucas is MP for Brighton Pavilion and Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fuel Poverty

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.